Math is Uncomfortable
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Honoring Baldwin County Sheriff Huey ``Hoss'' Mack
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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we are going to try to do something a little tricky this evening. You are going to see the continuing theme of, hey, here is where we are borrowing and here is where the borrowing is coming from.
Then I am going to hit on some of the things that--what is the next one--drive me almost insane on the questions I get here, the things I get on this stupid thing. I have come to this conclusion: We live in a world where the propaganda, the fake information, and the distortion fields around us actually do not want America to succeed.
That is a pretty dark thing to say, but let's actually walk through my theory. I am going to make the point. On some of these presentations, I have been blessed. If you go on YouTube, I had one a couple months ago, I think there is, like, 1.3 million views. Go look at the comments section. I will argue about half those comments are bots. They are fake.
You see things like: Well, if you just didn't give any money to Israel, we could balance the budget. You start to realize that there is a world out there that takes advantage of our open society, that comes at us with things that are lies, and the poor person out there who is just trying to take care of their family, on occasion, grabs their phone, tries to read little bits of news, maybe reads a comment or two, and they don't realize the information coming at them is absolute crap.
Then the other problem that I am going to show here is when I have my own President get behind a microphone, look at the American people, and say things that are absolutely not true. Then an idiot like myself tries to come up and say: I have a path. There is a path. If I can get my brothers and sisters on the left to work with us on the right, there is a path to save this country.
It is really hard when the State of the Union goes on that podium right there and says things that are absolutely not true.
Does that mean they are also a deliverer of fake information because math is hard? Math is uncomfortable. Telling the truth is hard. Maybe this place has lied for so many decades that the public says: Look, we are just going to believe whatever is comfortable.
Let's actually walk through, first, a little bit of reality here. I will start with this chart because it sort of lays out where we are at today. Do you see the red? That red area is 74 percent of the spending, and 74 percent of the spending in this place is on auto pilot. We don't get to vote on it.
Do you see the blue? That is what I get to vote on. That is defense and nondefense discretionary. I get to vote on that. Every dime of it is borrowed. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed money. Also, guess what--we are in so much trouble--I have net interest on this, which I think is unfair because there is this thing called net. That is the publicly borrowed. That is where the Treasury sells bonds.
I think, this week, we are selling $111 billion--maybe it is $112 billion or $113 billion--in three different auctions this week just to finance our insatiable spending because, remember--this is one of the things I find is uncomfortable even at home--100 percent of the borrowing from today through the next 30 years, according to CBO, is interest, Medicare, and if we backfill Social Security in a decade from now. It is demographics.
Yet, how do you make policy? There are ways to fix it with policy. When the leader of the free world looks into a camera and says things that are just insane when it comes to being on a calculator.
Take a look one more time. Nondefense discretionary, defense, all of that is borrowed, and a wedge--I should do a chart that shows you how much is borrowed money. I originally thought we might be at $2.5 trillion borrowing this year. Some of the tax receipts are a little bit better. Some of the spiking growth that we had in the first part of the fiscal year on healthcare costs have flattened ever so slightly, so we are probably going to end up borrowing around $2.3 trillion this year.
What that means is even part of the mandatory spending, Medicare, because remember, Medicare isn't all on the trust fund. The trust fund only covers 38, 40 percent. The rest comes out of the general fund. Once again, look at this chart and understand your government functionally is an insurance company with an army. That is meant to be sarcastic, but it is meant to sink in.
Let's actually walk through. I am going to walk through a couple of these just to sort of lay out where we are actually at. CBO predicts by 2054, so 30 years from now, budget deficits are entirely driven by Social Security and Medicare shortfalls.
We are not allowed to say that, are we? Does anyone remember the State of the Union? There was a handful of us, Democrats and Republicans, who had been quietly working for a year trying to put together a plan to save Social Security in the long run.
The President gets there and says: Promise me you won't talk about Social Security or Medicare. People look terrified and go: Okay. Yes, good campaign issue. They care more about winning the next election than protecting seniors. It is the great lie around here. You talk about it saying: I want to find a way to modernize and save, and you will get the crap kicked out of you. You also told the truth.
You have to look at the data, the charts. Remember, the SSA, the Social Security Administration's actuary numbers are actually substantially more optimistic than the Congressional Budget Office, so we are going to use the more optimistic numbers. When you start to realize and when the outlays are, over the next 30 years, starting to hit 17 percent of the entire economy and revenues don't come anywhere close to that, there is your crisis. We can just pretend because getting through the next election is more important.
Look, you have all seen this chart over and over and over and over and over and over that interest continues to grow, and we think actually the interest calculation--this is important. Let's do this right now. The hierarchy right now, today, Social Security will, this year, be $1.480 trillion. The total gross interest because, remember, just a couple days ago, I think we sent $36 billion to Social Security because we borrowed the money. Treasury had borrowed the money from the trust fund. We pay it back with interest. Total interest to the United States will approach $1.2 trillion this year.
Then you have Medicare, and then you have defense. Defense is functionally sitting as No. 4. How do you have a society that runs around thinking, well, if we just cut some defense? I showed you the chart before. You can get rid of every dime of defense, every dime of nondefense discretionary. That is the Park Service. That is the FBI. That is the Foreign Service. That is us. If you get rid of everything, you still have to borrow money.
You look at the charts over and over, and when we have had high marginal tax rates, we get about 18 percent of GDP in taxes. When we have had low marginal tax rates, we get about 18 percent of GDP. You have a long history--and I have done floor presentation after floor presentation--that when you lowered the rates, you grew the economy, you got about the same percentage of GDP. When you raised the tax rates, the economy shrunk a bit or slowed down, and you got the same percent of GDP.
The idea is grow the economy as much as possible, and then cut spending everywhere you can. I have some charts, and I don't know if I should do them again--actually, maybe I will just jump to them in a moment--where you lay out almost every tax hike that are the dreams of the left: Let's tax rich people who are over $400,000. Let's do this tax and that tax.
I come here with the academic papers and showed you, when you maximize all those tax rates, capital gains, income tax, estate tax, just do it all, you get about 1.5 percent of GDP.
For us on a cut side, it is brutal, but I can come up with almost $300 billion in nondefense discretionary. That is 1 percent of GDP. So, hey, together, we came up with 2.5 percent. We are borrowing 6 or 7 percent of the entire economy, and we have used up everything.
I mean, understand what is going on here. Just another chart that basically gives you a sense: Rising Social Security and Medicare shortfalls driven entirely or nearly the entire 2019 to 2034 deficit hikes. That means, in a 10-year window, almost all the growth of the debt and deficit during that time period, interest, Medicare, and then at the end of the decade, Social Security trust fund is gone. Right now, you will get a Democrat saying: Well, Social Security doesn't add anything to the deficit. They are absolutely correct until the trust fund is gone.
There is the part that enraged me the other night. If any of you were able to watch the Presidential debate the other night, my phone lit up at one point by a bunch of reporters who wanted to double check a number.
The President was asked about Social Security. I begin to make the wealthy--okay. I begin--and this is his actual quote, so it is disjointed, but this is what he said: `` . . . I begin to make the wealthy begin to pay their fair share, by increasing from 1 percent beyond, to be able to guarantee the program for life.''
He is talking about Social Security, so 1 percent. Then he went on to say: ``Well, that one enough will keep it solvent.''
The left's definition of wealthy is over $400,000 income, right? The President just told the American people 1 percent. I will fix Social Security by taxing them 1 percent.
We have a math problem. The problem here is, the blue you see here, that is not 1 percent. I had to make it 2 percent because the 1 percent was so small we figured you couldn't even see it. I doubled what the President said.
This is the shortfall. Half of this is what the President told you would work.
I am enraged by all the fake crap that comes into my phone in my office, our phones, our publications, all the things that you see on Twitter, or X, or whatever we are supposed to call it today, that are just made up by bots particularly and foreigners.
What happens now when my own President does it? How do I show up here? How do I get my brothers and sisters here to actually make policy? How do you make policy when the leader of the free world says things that are mathematically just insane?
The immorality here, functionally 9\1/2\ years, we double senior poverty in America. If we don't fix this, we double senior poverty. The Democrats will weaponize it because they care more about winning the next election.
We have a President who could have just looked in the camera and said: Look, we haven't had the number of children, therefore, the number of workers. We started the rollovers in 1990. It is just math. It is not Republican or Democrat. Demographics are what we are.
Last year, the United States had 1.62 children fertility rate, meaning, functionally, now our math is, in about 15 years, the United States will have more deaths than births. I say that over and over trying to get people to think.
If your brain is trapped somewhere in the 1990s' policy sets, none of that math is real anymore. It hasn't been real in 30 years.
This place is absolutely immoral. I brought charts here over and over and over, the Democrat solution saying: Instead of the President's 1 percent proposal, if you do the--what is it--the 14-point-whatever percent, 14.4 or 12.4 total Social Security tax, not the Medicare, not the unemployment, those things, and you put it on all income over $400,000--I have shown a number of charts--if you use the CBO math, it covers about 38 percent of the shortfall.
That is using over 12 points, both the employer and the employee's portion. I have a President who looks in the camera and says 1 percent. Now, let's come together at a townhall or a meeting here and say: Hey, guys, let's have an honest conversation because every day we wait, the on-ramp is harder to save Social Security.
Oh, David, the President already told us we are doing 1 percent on rich people. I can show you with the 12.4 you are covering only about 38 percent.
Why is this place so absolutely immoral? Do they really care that much more about winning the next election?
After the President said that, I started to dig through the stories other people had sent me. I had this woman text me weeks ago saying, did you know that with the money in Ukraine that the First Lady of Ukraine bought almost a million-dollar Bugatti, or however you pronounce that car.
Well, the BBC did a very long article about how much is absolutely fake coming into the U.S. marketplace of ideas. There are bot farms. There are troll farms. They created fake photos, which turns out that is what actually helped BBC identify that this is all fake stuff.
How do you make policy in a world where we are awash in things coming in from our enemies, from the countries that want us at each other's throats, make it impossible to do basic policy to save the Republic, and then my own President is making crap up?
Article after article of disinformation that is crashing in, the things I have that come into my office about Israel that are coming in from bot farms.
We have article after article that Microsoft did an analysis of how much was coming in from Chinese bot farms, Chinese servers. Apparently, we just had a major disruption by stopping 968 Twitter accounts that were completely fake and they were all coming from a bot farm in Russia. That happened this week. The State Department just identified that bot farm and got it shut down.
Mr. Speaker, I say now to my Democrat colleagues that we have actually had a couple stories come out that have some real fun stuff. It turns out a number of the Democrat activists are actually setting up fake newspapers. Now, if that wasn't bad enough, one of these articles in there actually has a section talking about that in American small town newspapers as many as half process this, as many as half are actually fake.
My wife pointed out to me that there was a newspaper from southern Kansas, where she grew up, that went out of business decades ago that somehow popped up in her news feed and it had this crazy stuff in it. Turns out, that was on the list of the ones that had been spoofed. A spoofed URL that looks like it is from Russia.
Think that about. In America, about half the small town online newspapers you see are actually fake.
How many of our constituents know that? It looks like the Democrats actually have decided, hey, this is a great business model. Let's make up fake newspapers online, have it laced with leftwing propaganda, and we will do it under a newspaper masthead.
How is this not a violation? Once again, the left proves they are a hell of a lot smarter than we are when it comes to being mercenary on campaigns. They figured out a way to get around the campaign finance laws. Spend money, but it is free speech. It is fake, but it is free speech. Then idiots like me get here and try to walk through the math.
Look, this is the MedPAC report. It is not that hard to read. You have quotes in here that in 2022, 13 percent of all personal and corporate income taxes collected by the Federal Government were transferred to the Medicare trust fund.
By 2030--so that is how many years? 5 budget years? 4 budget years?-- 22 percent of all tax receipts from corporate and individual income tax, 22 percent will just go to Medicare.
Functionally in a decade, you have gone from 13 to 22 percent of all tax receipts. It is demographics.
Why isn't this what we talk about around this place, how are we going to save these programs? Oh, you can't do that because you are going to have a President who is going to knife you by saying crazy things.
The Joint Economic Report we published a couple weeks ago, we tried to provide brutally honest math, brutal detail with actual solutions. Will anyone actually read it?
This one my staff was particularly fond of. It turns out that one of the new spoofings out there that are coming into young people's phones are celebrities with quotes that the celebrities have never said.
Are you all ready for this election cycle where you have AI memes looking like a Member of Congress, looking like a President, looking like a Senator, looking like a celebrity, saying things that are completely fake?
Now come here and try to do difficult policy where you are going to have to take on some bureaucracies, take on certain business models, adopt technology to crash the price of healthcare. Are you going to get hit by an army of bots, an army of fake videos, an army of fake postings, saying they can't do that, because some group has figured out that winning the election is stopping us from saving the country from its debt spiral?
I am trying to explain it is bad enough having to take on the bureaucracy, it is bad enough having to take on the calcified intellect, of particularly some of my friends here, that say we can just fix everything by taxing people more.
What happens when our voters have to face millions of absolutely fake information videos that are crashing at them? I can't wait to see the bots and the comments they put in the video below this posting.
Take a look here: ``Not touching Social Security means large benefit cuts.''
When you start to actually take a look--and I think we did this before. Remember, the number goes up and down depending on employment, but we were working on one the other day from last year's CBO number that basically showed the average couple would take about a $17,400 cut in their Social Security a decade from now when the trust fund is gone.
This is immoral. Shouldn't this actually be a place where we actually work on these things? Then you start to actually look at the lies-- excuse me--the misinformation that our brothers and sisters on the left keep saying.
Oh, when we did tax reform, it was a gift to the rich. Okay. You got a math problem. The higher income, the top 20 percent today pay 69 percent of all income taxes. It is more progressive today than the tax code has ever been. The wealthy pay a higher percentage of Federal income taxes today than ever before. The lower quartiles today pay the lowest Federal income tax rates since income taxes, 16th amendment.
How often do you hear this? But that doesn't fit the narrative. Then you have the jerks actually say things like this: Well, you guys had $1.7 trillion spending. Yes. We got $900 billion more revenue than expected, but that was horrible. We are going to spend about $2 trillion in grants and gifts and those things to big business because they do clean energy stuff. It is like they don't look at themselves in the mirror.
Once again, I have done entire presentations here going through every leftwing tax idea trying to add it up. Even when you don't do economic effects--if you do economic effects, these numbers--and then try to say, hey, you guys are only getting about a point and a half or so of GDP out of these numbers, you are not getting anywhere close. You got to do it through policy.
Then the fragility that no one was prepared for--well, some of us were prepared for--are interest rates. How many of you think interest rates are going back down, particularly in the long end of the curve?
Remember, what the Federal Reserve does is on the short end of the curve, meaning shorter term bonds. When you start to look at 10-year debt and up, some of the best bond traders and economists right now are saying it is not going down. You might get a little bit of a tick.
The United States is now number 14 on the credit stack, meaning Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than we can. You read the notes on the S&P's and the Moody's, it is not--we have one of the healthiest economies in the industrialized world, but one of the things that is going on is they don't trust us.
Will our governance be disciplined enough to actually take on the spending and the debt? The fact of the matter is, we are paying a premium now. The United States now pays a premium on our debt.
This week, I told you we are borrowing about--there are three auctions this week--$111 billion, and we are going to pay a premium on that debt. Sometimes this place doesn't look like we are serious about taking the debt on and managing our fiscal affairs.
First off, we are having great difficulties selling long-term bonds. Do you remember a few months ago we had sort of a bond tantrum? Why do you think Treasury moved things down to sell short-term, short-term, short-term? A lot of investors out there don't even trust this government enough to say, I am going to buy a 30-year U.S. savings bond and I am going to be safe.
Once again, even a 100 percent tax rate on small businesses and upper-income families could not come close to balancing the long-term budget in this country.
Stop thinking you are going do it with tax hikes or even for those of us who want to cut the size of government, you need to have revolutionized the cost of this government. Stop being afraid of technology. Stop being afraid of the things where we could change the cost of this government because it might affect your business model.
Look, I was going to try to put up one or two slides last for happy talk, until I realized one of the slides I wanted to show you was, once again, another concept of why the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act is the most Orwellian named piece of legislation in modern history.
They are very proud, saying we are subsidizing electric cars. My wife has an electric car. She loves it, but the data basically said--when they passed that, I came here to the floor and showed, hey, here is the survey data. Almost everyone that is going to buy an electric car is buying them with the subsidy, without the subsidy. It is a lifestyle. It is almost a status symbol, but let's give away billions and billions of dollars.
Now you actually have breakthroughs. Could you imagine if just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that resource had gone more into primary research? Looks like there has been a breakthrough on solar cells, an additional 25.7 percent efficiency, except the problem is it was developed in China.
The very people who preach at us to subsidize all this stuff, but let's subsidize less generations or maybe even the generation before that's technology.
You want me to put solar panels on my house, you want us to drive electric cars, make it so economically sensible and make it so economically affordable that it is the disruption.
Why did you stop going to Blockbuster Video? Because you had this button you could hit at home and stream videos right to your home. Was that subsidized by the government?
The fact of the matter is that there are technology disruptions. Why didn't we fixate on that? Well, it turns out that maybe the disruptions don't write checks to your campaign.
The Democrats' planned economy, the control of the marketplace, the arrogance that somehow they think they know what the future looks like instead of building a tax system or regulatory system that is competitive, that is disruptive. Some are winning; some are losing. That is the way the American economy is supposed to work.
In many ways, we have now built a society of oligopolies, thanks to Dodd-Frank and Democratic policies. They have made the big bigger, the big really powerful, and the really big and powerful now your constituency.
It turns out now that if you look at who votes for Republicans, it is entrepreneurs, working people, and those who are being crushed by those they have to compete with who now get subsidies from their political allies.
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